With the advent and rapid growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web, the quantity of information that many people now encounter has brought the term “information overload” into the lexicon. As the quantity of information continues to grow, it becomes increasingly important to tailor the content of information to meet the needs of Internet users—the consumers of information—so that they are not overloaded, and to meet the desires of information providers so that their voices are heard by the intended audience.
In the context of the Internet, the problem of tailoring information to combat information overload has been addressed in two ways. The first way is for the information provider to employ a personalization engine to tailor the information that is sent to the user, where the tailoring is guided by a sketchy characterization of the user that is appended to the message that the user's browser sends to open the information provider's web site. The second way is essentially the same as the first, except that the personalization engine retrieves the sketchy characterization of the user from a database that keeps historical records of the user's past interactions with the information provider.
Although providing some advantage, each of these approaches has its drawbacks. The rapid growth of the Internet has been accompanied by a wide variety of behavior patterns exhibited by Internet users, and a wide variety of equipment types employed by Internet users. Because of this wide variety, a one-size-fits-all approach to tailoring information does not work well, as the information provider cannot today determine with any degree of certainty how to best tailor the information delivered to the user so that potential for information overload is minimized.
Thus there remains a need to tailor the content of information delivered to a user in a way that efficiently accommodates a wide variety of behaviors, situations, and equipment, so that the user is not overloaded and the provider of the information is able to deliver an effective message.